I think I write most freely when picked up and carried by moments that might be called “tone poems.” Local habitats supplemented by sounds that draw acquiescence from my marrow. Small visual aids that speak. Evocative subject matter is around and boasts of a singular capacity to tap whatever nostalgic nerves are strung up and down my spine, of which I imagine an oak loom wrapped erringly with silk. There is the need to be romanced by the world. Winds free dust from old feelings and the smell of new flowers excite not-yet-known memories. A window’s true glance into bed linens drums more furiously than imagination ever could. And I sometimes wonder what it is about extrinsic participles that convince my brain to give them first rights. The streetlamp at the corner sprouts limbs and with grace flips through prefaces and epilogues to thumb the exact right emotion: it asks me in sepia hues if I remember the drives, as a kid, to go pick up my mom when she worked as late as she did while the portioned dinner my dad had made sat tepid in the microwave, my sister beside me reeling in tandem at every bend my dad took at speed through the night, and I see her face as candlelit in waxy tones each time the sodium of the streetlights falls into harmonic resonance over our car. Why am I struck like this by a recollection so old, and what do I do with the fragments? A path padded by rusted pine needles tempts in vestigial babble, a diamond-mailed fence at its back, the yielding trees watching over like stalwart parents offering genteel supervision to whims. The certain scent of a tended garden springs to kindergarten life and I wonder after the mother of a friend – her second-hand depression, her appropriation of my care which I could never appreciate fully, and now praise. A field of blonde grass under a wind fan, groomed in places where other children learned with their dads how to bike distances, down hills and inevitably back up, and if you listen close the grasshoppers murmur in tune with cotton white dandelion tops destemming themselves; the symphony sings of early fall’s benevolence on sleeveless limbs. There are back alleys that announce on local street signs that the chase of these scraps is feeble where practicality is concerned, and from the futility itself grows a sadness: a cut tie that could have traced back to maybe knowing myself best, whenever that was, wherever I was standing then. Who am I without these intangible touchstones of place, of time, of disposition? How do they piece together, and what grounds lay underfoot in present day.